Pints finally flow again as Cardiff’s rebuilt Vulcan hotel opens for business
For more than a century and a half, the Vulcan hotel served dockers, railway workers, artists, sports stars, gamblers and dreamers, and the demise in 2012 of this beloved, spitand-sawdust Cardiff pub felt like a bereavement.
Twelve years on, the pints are about to flow again after a painstaking project to move the old alehouse brick by brick to a new site and reopen it as a working pub.
“It feels weird but wonderful,” said Gwyn Lewis, who was Vulcan landlord when it was closed, as he walked for the first time into the reconstructed, revamped pub, now to be found on the edge of the Welsh capital at the St Fagans National Museum of History.
The stories began to pour out. How James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Peachers – who once told the Guardian that it was the “perfect example of an old-fashioned Welsh pub, beautifully basic” – used to come in for a quiet drink but would then get his guitar out for an impromptu gig.
How a couple of New Zealand rugby internationals liked to pop in for a pint when the All Blacks were playing Wales. “They were the very devil to get out,” Lewis said. And how the pub used to open on a Sunday, although they knew only six regulars would turn up.
“Very old, they were,” said Lewis. “They used to call the pub God’s waiting room.”
The Vulcan stood at 10 Adam Street in Cardiff, an area then known as Newtown that was built from the 1830s to house the growing workforce needed to construct and service Cardiff docks.
It was first registered as an ale house in 1853 and at the start of the 20th century it was remodelled and a bright, tiled facade added.
In 1915 the pub was managed by a couple, Denis and Julia MacCarthy, and the museum’s researchers tracked down their daughter, Ellen, to record her memories.
She described how working men drank in the main bar while couples tended to gather in the betterappointed smoke room and women in a cramped passageway.
In the 1960s Newtown was demolished and the community dispersed. The pub stood alone but still attracted artists, singers and students. By 2008 the Vulcan faced demolition. There was a campaign to save it, but its final night of trading was in 2012. An asset management company that owned the building offered it to National Museum Wales.
Janet Wilding, the head of the historic buildings unit at the museum, remembers the pub’s final days. “It was caked in nicotine, but it always had a really good atmosphere. It was known for having the best beer in Cardiff because the cellar was next to the canal so it was naturally cool.”
The museum has restored the pub as it would have been in 1915. It has sawdust on the floor and a spittoon, though Hayley Budd, who will be running it, said she would not be happy if anyone used it.
The Vulcan reopens today, offering beer produced by the local Glamorgan Brewing Company as well as pickled eggs and pork scratchings.
Dafydd Wiliam, the principal curator historic buildings at the museum, said: “It’s a legendary Cardiff pub and represents all the pubs that we’ve lost not just in Cardiff but around Britain. It’s a terrible shame because they’re really valuable community spaces.”
Another former landlady, Liz Smart, once said the Vulcan, “like Star Trek”, would live for ever. That may be a little optimistic, but it certainly has a new lease of life.